Bash – Remove all files, except for two

bashwildcards

I would like to delete everything in one folder, with the exception of two files:

exec.js
.git

I found this:

rm !(exec.js|.git)

Which works in the CL, but when I try to store in a sh file, and call with bash file.sh, this happens:

test.sh: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `('
test.sh: line 1: `rm !(exec.js|.git)'

Any ideas why?

Best Answer

You need

shopt -s extglob

inside the script.

Your bash configuration presumably turns this on automatically for interactive shells (perhaps because you load the bash-completion package for context-sensitive completion); you need to turn it on manually inside scripts.

Also make sure that your script starts with #!/bin/bash (or a variant like #!/usr/bin/env bash, otherwise it may be executed by a different shell that doesn't support this syntax.

For example, this script will create a few files and then remove all except the two you want to keep:

$ cat x
#!/bin/bash

shopt -s extglob

touch f1 f2 f3 exec.js .git foo bar

echo Before: $(ls -A)

rm !(exec.js|.git)

echo After: $(ls -A)

In execution:

$ bash x
Before: .git bar exec.js f1 f2 f3 foo x
rm: cannot remove '.': Is a directory
rm: cannot remove '..': Is a directory
After: .git exec.js

Note that you get errors with . and ..; you'll have seen those on the command line as well:

$ touch f1 f2 f3 exec.js .git foo bar

$ rm !(exec.js|.git)
rm: cannot remove '.': Is a directory
rm: cannot remove '..': Is a directory

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An alias is expanded simply by replacing the alias by its definition (as a list of tokens, not a string, which is basically equivalent to taking the string and adding a space at the end). So stopdev; true is expanded to

cd $HOME/website; make website_stop; make backend_stop; ; true
                                                      ^^^

Since you can't have two consecutive semicolons in the shell syntax, that's a syntax error.

You can remove the ;, and that will make stopdev; startev work, but it isn't good, because any argument you pass to stopdev will be passed to make backend_stop, which is probably not desirable.

You should make this a function. Also, don't run the make commands if the cd command fails.

stopdev () {
  cd "$HOME/website" && {
    make website_stop
    make backend_stop
  }
}

An improvement would be to make the function return a failure code even if make website_stop fails but make backend_stop succeeds.

stopdev () {
  cd "$HOME/website" && {
    make website_stop
    ret=$?
    make backend_stop && return $ret
  }
}

Note that this leaves you in the ~/website directory. To avoid changing the directory of the shell process, run the function in a subshell.

stopdev () (
  cd "$HOME/website" && {
    make website_stop
    ret=$?
    make backend_stop && return $ret
  }
)

Alternatively, with GNU make, you can use its -C option.

stopdev () {
  make -C "$HOME/website" website_stop
  ret=$?
  make -C "$HOME/website" backend_stop && return $ret
}

If the targets never fail, just pass them both.

stopdev () (
  cd "$HOME/website" && make website_stop backend_stop
)

stopdev () {
  make -C "$HOME/website" website_stop backend_stop
}

Best Answer

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